Drool Baby (A Dog Park Mystery) (Lia Anderson Dog Park Mysteries) (8 page)

"I don't believe it," Lia said. "She just stood there and didn't do anything while her dogs attacked that beagle."

They watched as the dogs dispersed. Jose and the woman continued to have words as she collected her dogs and left. Jose called Sophie and headed towards
the back of the park. He was muttering to himself as he and Sophie joined them.

"Did you see that?" he asked. "That crazy lady just accused me of stirring the dogs up. She claimed they would have worked it out and been fine if I'd
left them alone."

"How is that poor beagle?" Anna asked.

"She's bleeding, but it's not bad. Roger pulled her out before they really got going on her."

"What were you and Roger thinking, jumping into a dog fight?" Lia said.

Jose shrugged. "What are you gonna do when you got a pack going like that? Not like we had a garden hose handy to spray them with."

Jim picked up his walking staff. "If you carried a stick like mine, you could pry them apart."

"I read that the best way to stop a dog fight is to grab your dog by the hind legs and pull back," Anna said.

"I heard that. I never tried it," Jose said.

"Too many amateurs," Lia said. "It's almost enough to make me stay home on holidays."

"At least they ain't been drinking," Jose said.

Despite the bad comb-over, the watery, pale eyes and the basketball of extra weight he was carrying under his shirt, Phil Rumsey was as sharp as they came.
He grinned when he saw Peter, showing off yellowed teeth. "We've got something interesting here," he announced, holding up a large manilla envelope.

Peter raised his eyebrows. "That so?"

"It is, it is. Come on back to the conference room and I'll explain it to you. Coffee?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

Phil led him to a long, narrow room with a twelve foot oak table surrounded by stuffed leather swivel chairs. Business was apparently good.

"Is this what you do with the money we pay you?"

"One of the things, yes," Phil grinned, unapologetic.

Phil sat at the end of the table and Peter took a chair around the corner. Phil squared-up the envelope to the table's edge, then folded his hands over it.
He cleared his throat. Peter found these preparatory gestures annoying, but did not say anything.

"First thing we did was weigh all the capsules." He pulled a report out of the envelope and indicated a column of figures halfway down. "There were
thirteen capsules left in the bottle. Each of the weights were different."

"Huh."

"Yep." Phil cleared his throat again. "Now the interesting part. What was in the capsules, do you suppose?" Here he paused for dramatic effect.

Peter would have rolled his eyes, but he didn't want to antagonize the man. He decided to play his part and asked, "What was it?" like a good cop.

"Depakote." Phillip gave him a meaningful look.

"What?" Peter leaned forward. "That doesn't make any sense."

"You wouldn't think so, would you. I'm not the detective, that's your job. But the different weights and misalignment of the capsules suggest they were
filled by hand."

"Why would someone fill it by hand just to put Depakote in them?"

"Again, I'm not a detective, but I suspect it would be because something else was in them earlier."

"Makes sense," Peter considered.

"So I went looking for traces of other chemicals, scraped samples off the insides of the caps. Guess what I found."

This time Peter didn't miss a beat. "I have no idea."

"BC Headache Powder."

"Can you still get that?"

"Apparently. And that's not all. BC Powder was in ten of the caps. In two we found amphetamine, and in one we found a hallucinogen, a derivative of LSD."

"So someone dumps out the Depakote, replaces it with other drugs, then later goes back and replaces the Depakote to erase the evidence."

"That would be an appropriate scenario for what we found." Phil smiled at his star pupil. He replaced the report in the envelope, then handed it to Peter.
"Interesting case you have here."

"Isn't that the truth."

I have been thinking that I'd never experienced primal aggression before Catherine, but that is not true. An old memory has come into focus, like a
photographic image emerging in a bath of developer. I could not have been more than six years old. I was playing with the brat next door.

This was not my
idea. I didn't like her. She was prettier than I was. She had more toys, and she thought she was better than I was. My mother wished to be friends with her
mother, probably because they were better off than we were. So I had to play with the brat.

She only let me play with her old dolls, never the pretty new one. I remember that doll, it had long, silky blond hair in waves held back with a blue
ribbon. It was dressed in a pretty, ruffled pinafore. She called it Clarissa. She stroked Clarissa's hair and told me that she only let her very best
friends hold Clarissa, and I would have to make do with Dora.

Dora had coarse, muddy brown hair and she did not have a pinafore. She was older than Clarissa. We were playing tea party. I sat Dora down and gave her
some tea. The brat said Dora had to be the maid and get tea for Clarissa. Then she sneered at me.

I held Dora by the legs and stood her up, pretending I
was walking her. I swung Dora like a bat and hit the brat in the head. While she was howling, I took Clarissa from her and ripped Clarissa's arms off. I
enjoyed the horror in her eyes as I dismembered her favorite toy. She screamed even louder.

Then I smashed Clarissa's face on the floor so she would never
be pretty again. I shoved Clarissa back at her and resumed giving tea to poor, unworthy Dora.

My mother was very unhappy about this. The brat was given her choice of my toys, and she picked a pretty palomino pony with a mane as lovely as Clarissa's
hair while telling me that none of my toys were as good as Clarissa. I was made to apologize to her. My mother told me that if I didn't act sorry when I
apologized, I would lose all my toys and never get another one.

I learned from my mother that it did not matter what other people did. I had to behave well at all times. Getting angry was never permitted, for any
reason. She needed to teach me, she said, to be a lady.

I revenged myself for the loss of the pony. The brat had a kitten. It was a pretty white kitten named Snowball. It got out one day when I was playing in
the yard by myself. We had a rain barrel in the back. I put the kitten in the rain barrel and held it under until it stopped struggling. Then I buried it
in the garbage can. The brat cried when she asked me if I had seen Snowball. I said I was oh, so sorry she lost her kitten. I acted like a lady.

Lia opened the door and invited Jim into her apartment. "Come on back, Peter's already here." She led him to her kitchen, where Peter sat the the table
with a glass of tea. "I made some guacamole and salsa. Would you like some ice tea? I've got raspberry tea and plain sweet tea, if raspberry is too girly
for you."

"Raspberry sounds good, thank you." Lia poured the tea, then set out the chips and dip while Jim looked around the sunny kitchen, "Seems too cheerful in
here, considering why we're meeting."

"Sorry, left my cloak at the cleaners, and my dagger is out getting sharpened," Lia said. "I suppose we could meet under a pier at midnight, but that would
be inconvenient."

"True," Jim agreed.

"We start acting all mysterious, and people will notice," Lia continued.

"We still have to come up with a reason for me being here, in case anyone asks," Jim said.

"I thought of that. You came by to look at my drawings for Renee. You're reviewing the plans from an engineering standpoint. I want you to do that anyway,
so it'll be the truth."

"I guess that'll work."

"That's settled," Peter said. "Shall we get down to business?"

Lia and Jim turned polite expressions to Peter.

"I got the report about Bailey's Depakote back from the lab."

"And?" Lia asked.

"The meds were doctored, and not by Frank."

"How can you tell?" Jim asked. "You said there was no way to know who did the tampering."

"There's no way to tell who did it, but I can say for sure that who ever it was, they didn't want anyone to find out about it."

"What makes you say that?" Lia asked.

Peter laid out the findings for them. He concluded, "So someone removed the Depakote and replaced it with BC Powder to get Bailey off her meds and make her
unstable. At the same time, or at a later date, they added some meth and a hallucinogen, possibly buried these down in the bottom of the pill bottle. That
way, once Bailey had the Depakote out of her system, the street drugs would set her off in some way. After this was accomplished, they came back and
replaced the Depakote in the capsules so no one would find out.

"I'm convinced Bailey's right. I thought she was trying to run a scam to get out of trouble, but she'd want us to find something and this person went to a
lot of trouble in an attempt to hide it."

"Poor Bailey," Lia murmured. "Is this enough to prove she was off her meds?"

"At some point, she may need to get hair analysis. That could be helpful. It may also tell us what she was on that sent her over the edge. For all we know,
there were additional drugs we didn't find because she'd taken them."

"Why didn't they just replace the doctored capsules with new ones?" Jim asked. "Then we'd have never found this."

"It's likely our perp didn't have access to a prescription for Depakote, or didn't want to leave a paper trail," Peter responded.

"This changes everything," Lia said. "I don't know if I can ever forgive her, but I don't want her to go to jail on my account. Who do I speak to about
dropping the charges?"

"We can't do that yet," Peter said. "We've got a bigger problem."

"Officially, Catherine killed Luthor, then drowned by accident. Baileys's assault is being treated as a separate incident. Unofficially, the powers that be
believe Bailey killed Catherine and Luthor, but we haven't been able to prove it. So they're hot to put her away with any excuse they can find. They won't
want to drop the case. With attempted murder, they can proceed without you. If you don't cooperate, you can be charged with obstruction of justice."

"What do we do about it?" Jim asked

"Whoever tampered with Bailey's meds is still around. It couldn't be Catherine, because she died before Bailey went haywire. The second tampering would
have taken place after that. And if we drop the charges against Bailey, it will tip off our perp."

"And we don't want that," Jim said.

"Wouldn't tipping them off force their hand and cause them to make mistakes?" Lia asked.

"This isn't the movies. Playing games like that could get someone killed. Right now they should be feeling pretty safe. We want them to stay that way. It
will give us time to do some digging."

"And we should continue to meet here. Nobody thinks anything about me being here because we're dating. And Jim has a plausible reason for being here, to
help with your totem pole."

"It's not a totem pole. It's a solar marker."

"Whatever. And you two need to watch what you say at the park. It's too easy for someone to walk up behind you. Our perp is sneaky and dangerous."

Peter turned to Lia. "I'd really rather you weren't involved in this at all. It would keep you safer."

"Whoever it is, they almost got me killed and sent Bailey to the psych unit and maybe prison while wrecking our friendship. You can't expect me to stay out of
this."

Peter sighed. "I might expect it, but I don't know what good it would do. Promise me you won't do anything stupid?"

"Stupid like what?"

Peter's head swam with possibilities. "Stay out of the woods, unless you're with your therapist. And no meeting with anyone alone unless it's Jim."

"Seriously? I can't do that. I've got work to do and a client to see."

"You can see Renee. I'm sure she's not involved. Anyone else, you meet with in a public place."

"How do I explain that?"

"Tell them you want to get out because the project is giving you cabin fever and you have to drive in separate cars because you have errands to run. They
shouldn't think anything about it."

"What if someone wants to see how the drawings are coming on Renee's sculpture?

"You can say you're not happy with them yet and you don't want to show anyone. Even better, say Renee swore you to secrecy. Then you have an excuse to keep
everyone out of your apartment."

"I don't believe this." Lia folded her arms and glared at Peter. "This is like universal precautions. You want me to wear a face mask and rubber gloves,
too?"

"Jim, back me up here," Peter begged.

"Sorry, I don't get involved in domestic arguments. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

"What if someone comes to the door?" Lia demanded.

"Don't let them in unless I'm here. Better yet, I'm moving in with you."

"What?" Lia gasped.

Jim placed both hands over his ears. "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!" he said louder.

"It'll only be for a short time," Peter offered.

"We've got our lists! I don't have to treat everyone like they're lepers!"

"Lia, the lists pinpoint our most likely suspects. But we don't know for sure our perp is on Bailey's list. Look, can we talk about this later, after we
finish our business?"

"Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!" Jim repeated.

"I guess so," Lia grumbled. "But this isn't over. Geezelpete, Jim, will you take your hands off your ears and stop saying mea culpa, mea culpa?"

"Hoo boy. Are we all still friends? Is the furniture intact?" Jim asked.

"Very funny. I bet you're on his side."

"I'm not on anyone's side. Can I have more of your wonderful tea?"